Why We Love: Text Expander

Why We Love: Text Expander

Do you spend a lot of time typing the same things over and over again? We do. And not just when developing… There are plenty of boiler plate text items that we type over and over whether it be in design, typing up creative briefs, composing emails, or filling out forms online. Anything that can help us do our jobs faster, increases our productivity and our bottom line. Enter Text Expander! A handy tool for creating text shortcuts. This month, we are featuring a few of the benefits of Text Expander…

How it Works:

Text Expander

 lets you create shortcuts for longer, boilerplate text. For example, I am constantly typing out Alt Creative’s address in emails when scheduling meetings with people who have never been to our offices before. Instead of typing the full street address, suite number, city/state/zip, etc., I created a shortcut within Text Explander so when I type “$a”, it automatically replaces that string with our full street address.

As you can imagine, doing that type of automatic text replacement is super useful.

Don’t memorize, expand!

If you’re a developer or designer, using Text Expander is helpful for those code snippets that you can’t always remember the syntax for or those long strings of “Lorem ipsum”.

Canned responses made easy.

This is a great tool for sales people or customer service reps who use the same scripts of text in emails to customers. Just create the shortcut and voilà! instant canned response. You can even tell Text Expander where to put the cursor in the replacement text so that you can edit commonly changed items like name or greeting.

Achieve form filling bliss.

Breeze through forms: put your address, email, phone and fax numbers in your snippet library and call them up with a handful of keystrokes.

Automatically fix typos and misspellings.

I am a pretty good speller, but certain words trip me up. Pretty much any word with French origins cause a complete spelling panic (i.e. hors d’oeuvre, soirée, fiancée) so I have created some simple shortcuts for those commonly used words.

Some more features include:

• Reposition the cursor in the expanded snippet, or use our new fill-in-the-blank snippets to enter variable data in multiple fields.
• Sync snippets via Dropbox; use snippets on multiple devices (with TextExpander touch)
• Organize snippets into groups
• Search snippets from menu bar or via keyboard shortcut
• Get suggestions of matching abbreviations via keyboard shortcut
• Add snippet groups from external files and online sources
• HTML, CSS, AutoCorrect, Accented Words, Symbols snippet groups included
• Internet Productivity snippet group (shorten long URLs automatically)
• Insert the current date and time in any format you prefer
• Date/time math (add or subtract years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds from current date and time)

Text Expander

is available only for the Mac, but if you love this functionality and want it for your PC, check out PhraseExpress.